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Chicago Pastor James Meeks Bids a Tearful Farewell After 38 Years at Salem Baptist

“Fear not,” she said, before pulling out a Bible and asking the congregation to read along with her from the book of Deuteronomy about the transition in leadership from Moses to Joshua.

“Pastor, did they really think I was going come up here and talk to this congregation and not know my Bible?” she joked as laughter and smiles filled the room.

Meeks’ family was on hand for the service, including his granddaughter, whom he blessed before starting his sermon, and his 93-year-old mother. The service also included a video tribute to his wife, Jamell, who played a prominent role in the ministry.

The service was filled with music, beginning with an energetic version of “In the Sanctuary,” with gospel composer Kurt Carr and the Kurt Carr Singers, along with a massive choir and the church band. Choir members, the band and the congregation also joined Meeks in a gospel song, repeating the phrase “Do You Remember That Day” over and over before his final sermon began.

Meeks, 66, had initially begun talks about retirement in 2019, but those plans were put on hold after the outbreak of the pandemic. He wanted to step down while he was still in good health and while the church was doing well.

“Sometimes people stay too long,” he said in an interview a few days before his retirement. “I always want to be in a position where I am welcomed back here.”

Meeks — a Chicago native who first began preaching as a teenager — also felt that a new voice was needed in the pulpit, someone who could take the old messages of the Bible and teach them to a new generation. The country is in a time of great change and upheaval, he said, and people are looking for God.

“I think that people are inquisitive about who God is, ‘How do I meet him? How can I know him?’” he said. “It’s incumbent upon the church, to be able to say, ‘Here God is, this is how you can meet him. This is how you get to know him.’ And I think Charlie is that communicator for our age today.”

For Dates, becoming senior pastor of Salem is a homecoming. He attended the church’s school as a child, first meeting Meeks when he was in the 5th grade. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, he served on staff at Salem in 2011 before becoming pastor, at age 30, of Progressive Baptist Church, a historic Black congregation.

Dates helped revitalize Progressive Baptist and will, for a time, preach at both churches. He said in an interview that there’s a sense of excitement and apprehension in his new role. While Meeks will take some time away from the church — he plans to stay away till at least August — Dates said he hopes to be able to call his mentor for advice and counsel.

He also said he hopes Salem, as a larger congregation, can be a resource to other congregations in the city of Chicago. He told Christianity Today magazine last year that the city needs “the Black church to be her best and brightest self,” something he addressed in an interview with Religion News Service.

“Historically,” he said, “the flourishing of Black people in America, and specifically in Chicago, is tethered to the Black church.” That remains the case, he said.

“The Black church, in particular, has a history of knowing how to help people flourish, how to understand God’s relationship to those who’ve lived in oppression and under oppression, without taking pity or sorrow, but empowering them,” he said. “If there ever were a time where Chicago needed the Black church, man, I think this era is it.”

Despite the church’s growth, Meeks remained hands-on as a pastor — visiting the sick, counseling families in crisis and grieving with those who lost loved ones. Those ties with people he loves will be the hardest to give up, said Meeks, who said he had mixed feelings about leaving.

“I’ve always wanted to finish well, and be well when I finished,” he said. “But it is hard to dislodge yourself from people that you love.”

During his last sermon, handwritten like all his others on a yellow legal pad, Meeks referenced the Apostle Paul’s farewell in the book of Acts and how the church in Ephesus wept at Paul’s departure. He would weep, too, at saying goodbye.

Meeks — who pledged to remain at the end of the service until he’d shaken every person’s hand and said every goodbye — recalled the most memorable moments in his ministry: being present in the hospital or the graveside with church members, watching children being born and years later, attending their graduation. Teaching church members the Bible and leading them on what he called his crusade to change the community.

It was alright to cry at goodbye, he told church members.

“Tears are a sign that something meaningful has happened,” Meeks said.

This article originally appeared here.